Hypnotix

[Galaxysurfer]

Happened upon this project. Could the work here help us to upgrade & modernize the functionality of SageTV?

Check it out here https://github.com/linuxmint/hypnotix

https://www.fossmint.com/hypnotix-ip...app-for-linux/

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Galaxysurfer

Happened upon this project. Could the work here help us to upgrade & modernize the functionality of SageTV?

Check it out here https://github.com/linuxmint/hypnotix

https://www.fossmint.com/hypnotix-ip...app-for-linux/

I don't think this does much to help modernize sagetv (my guess is that you are basically asking for IPTV support in sagetv). This is good site though for free to use iptv streams, which is interesting.

The challenge with bringing IPTV to sagetv is really the fundamental architecture of sagetv in that it's a "guide first" solution. It would be fairly easy to create a network tuner in sagetv that can serve up IPTV stream, the challenge is how to integrate that into sagetv since there would be no guide data. So, feeding streams to sagetv (or anything for that matter) is almost useless unless you know the guide data for that stream, and that information is not available in the stream, and, to make things worse, it's not like you can pay a guide service 25/year to get guide data for the iptv streams. (there's a business opportunity for someone... create a crowdsourced guide data service for iptv streams)

You could do things like create a fake guide for each iptv channel and then with "unavailable" in 30 min slots, but then you just have channel roulette and you have no idea what you are watching, just, it's "CBC" or "GlobalTV", which is useless for recording and livetv.

So the first challenge is really getting guide data... after that getting the streams to play/record is almost trivial.

[Striker:WG]

As someone who's never used IPTV before, maybe i'm completely missing something that is obvious to others but, how does the guide data work in other systems that provide IPTV sources?

What your describing sounds like a fundamental challenge for any system, so I would imagine this data is available in some format already, no?

[stuckless]

Originally Posted by Striker:WG

As someone who's never used IPTV before, maybe i'm completely missing something that is obvious to others but, how does the guide data work in other systems that provide IPTV sources?

What your describing sounds like a fundamental challenge for any system, so I would imagine this data is available in some format already, no?

I think IPTV basically falls into 3 categories...

1. Pirated IPTV - They take Bell, Dish, etc, and just restream it, which means they have guide data, and they make it available.

2. Legit IPTV - These are like cable companies and they legally aggregate content, and they also get access to the guide data and they make it available, usually requires their own clients. (ie, Plex TV would fit into this, but my LG TV has this built in as well)

3. Completely free streams. These are usually just streams and for something like CBC, maybe they are following the Canada East feed, or Canada West, I guess you can start shows and try to figure out which channel and which timeslot they exist on a Bell or Rogers epg. Then repeat that for every channel. The site that was listed here is a complete free and legit set of IPTV channels but there's no guide data. I'm sure it exists somewhere, but figuring it out per channel would be tedious.

So likely candidate #1 would be the easiest to integrate with sagetv, since, they are just taking the normal system and re-broadcasting it over IPTV.

[NetworkGuy]

Originally Posted by stuckless

2. Legit IPTV - These are like cable companies and they legally aggregate content, and they also get access to the guide data and they make it available, usually requires their own clients. (ie, Plex TV would fit into this, but my LG TV has this built in as well)

Cable companies do the same thing, encrypting channels and required you use their hardware to watch or use a CableCard (which is now going away) in your own hardware. (Notice that HDHomeRun has gone to only offering OTA devices.) You end up forced into a solution which only has the features they want to offer.

It is a shame, but this seems to be the current trend in the industry.

[Galaxysurfer]

That's too bad. I was thinking on the lines of accessing content all in one place, sort of like Roku & Firestick do now where they aggregate multiple sources thru one device. Sagetv used to have Hulu & Youtube one click away. I was envisioning this being an alternative with streamed channels etc. Maybe that isn't possible due to agreements with Google after it allowed the software to go opensource.